music clip of the day

Jimmy Witherspoon (vocals) with Art Pepper (alto saxophone), “Past Forty Blues,” live, Los Angeles, 1981

Art never fails to captivate. But it’s hard to watch this without mixed emotions. He looks, to these eyes, completely coked up. The next year, at the age of fifty-six, he suffered a fatal stroke.

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lagniappe

reading table

[W]hen a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.

—Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch (reviewed by novelist Claire Messud in the Dec./Jan. 2014 Bookforum)